Training & Certification

Closing skill gaps and improving job capabilities through blended, performance-based instructional design

EXPERTISE

How can we boost your efforts?

Workshops & Webinars

Whether we are delivering them for you or we are simply producing the materials that your facilitators will use to deliver them, our workshops are highly interactive, hands-on events that tend to involve scenario-based activities, learning games, hands-on practice, and intense group discussions.

eLearning & Online Testing

We can design and build custom elearning modules for your content to be deployed on-demand through your LMS to different devices. We often employ a flipped learning approach, where we utilize self-paced elearning modules and online testing as prework for live events.

Instructional Video

We have been producing instructional videos for decades, as part of elearning courses and as stand-alone videos used in change communications and live workshops. We have filmed video on location, in studios, and on green screen… with professional actors, our own facilitators, and client SMEs.

Simulations & Online Games

Our performance-based approach relies heavily on interactivity, practice, and feedback, so we often employ simulations and games (on-demand and live) to get people doing, rather than just passively watching and listening. This approach ensures higher transfer of skills on the job, where it counts.

TRAINING & CERTIFICATION

Success Stories

Skills-Driven Hiring & Development Training

We designed and built a Career Development Toolkit: interactive PDF’s that guided and supported this sales team in their pursuit to promote, retain, and develop their workforce, as well as assessing and selecting top candidates for hire. After developing skills guides and career ladders across 4 roles, we conducted a workshop with re-enforcement games to help the organization become fluent with the skills frameworks. Once we had defined “what good looked like,” we developed skills-based interview guides, a Manager’s Guide to Interviewing, and conducted a workshop to introduce Directors to these new tools.

Mentoring for Peer Coaches

This program leverages our Mentoring skills framework to teach peer coaches, like sales field trainers, how to be more effective in supporting their team. My Mentor Legacy is a 2-hour vILT program that introduces the skills framework, best practices, and how to self-assess using our interactive PDF. We’ve also created 360 surveys to gather and assess team feedback on an individual’s strengths and and areas of growth with mentoring skills.

Monthly Webinars for Field Trainers

We created a program for sales field trainers to sharpen their coaching and training skills, including a series of monthly webinars covering an array of topics like: Leading Without Authority, Supporting Change, Delivering Feedback, Adapting to Your Learners. Flexing Your Style, Courageous Conversations, and Turning Stories into STARS. These webinars had supporting Participant Guides and worksheets, pre- and post-work, and activities designed to offer quick practice of the skills introduced in each session.

Empowering Learning Ambassadors

Peer trainers can have a big impact on adoption of best practices at a local level in organizations. In preparation for a big org change initiative, we helped a client create a Learning Ambassador Program, training individual contributors to take informal leadership roles as change agents supporting local pull-through efforts within their teams. Leveraging information guides, onboarding webinars, Ambassador toolkits, and scheduled feedback loops, these top contributors developed monthly plans, organized pull-through activities, guided people leaders as they engaged with their teams in developing discussions, providing ongoing program feedback/recommendations, and monitoring progress.

Flipped, Blended Learning & Certification

We designed and built a blended curriculum involving a series of elearning modules, online assessments, and an instructor-led workshop to train HR professionals worldwide on how to support their businesses through a merger or acquisition. We flipped the training by putting all of the knowledge content into the self-paced elearning modules, which participants completed in advance of attending the workshop. After completing the modules and passing the online assessments, participants were eligible to attend the live workshop, where they engaged in hands-on practice activities, review games, case-based exercises, and group discussion.

Presentation and Persuasion Skills with Practice

The first of this pair of workshops gives learners the confidence that comes with knowing the fundamentals of good presentations…from preparing materials, setting up the room, and organizing content to handling questions and managing discussion. Building on that confidence, the second workshop focuses on building and delivering a compelling presentation, one that persuades the audience. In both workshops, there is frequent, hands-on practice as well as a final activity that involves the learner presenting, then reviewing the video recording with the instructor, who provides feedback and coaching.

Consultative Selling Skills with Practice

This series of e-learning tutorials was built with HTML and Javascript, incorporating frequent scenario-based practice exercises. In one module, where learners are learning how to ask for referrals, the learner listens to a character doing it, evaluates her performance, using the slider scales, then gets feedback from the expert on how he would have assessed it.

Troubleshooting and Customer Service

We designed and developed a blended curriculum (ILT, e-learning, coaching) that was organized around ability level. With new hires, we focused on basic troubleshooting processes and tools. As they certified at each level and advanced, the training focused less on the technical troubleshooting aspects of the job and more on the inter-personal customer service skills, such as handling an irate customer. The highest level help desk personnel are taught how to mentor and coach the more junior personnel.

Systems Training for Key Business Process

When an organization builds or installs an enterprise system to support its key business process, the training cannot just focus on the keystrokes and mouse clicks. In this series of systems training courses, we articulated the business process and helped learners understand how the system fits into that process as well as how their role in the process drives business success downstream. Because there are several audiences, with different levels and types of involvement with the process and system, we built several variations of the training to suit each audience’s needs. With one audience, in fact, we scaled back the training to reference cards only, because of how they typically interact with the system.

Skills Framework Training

It’s not enough to build a skills framework. In order for it to have an impact on the organization, people need to understand what good looks like in the context of their day-to-day jobs. To help a global manufacturer gain adoption of their skills framework, we developed a series of video-based elearning modules. Each module contained videos explaining a skill in detail, discussing each success factor and describing what good looks like in the context of different day-to-day work situations. The modules also included video interviews conducted with senior leaders, where they explained what those success factors meant to them and provided real-world examples to demonstrate them.